


They Blink and Reality Shivers

by indelicates



Category: Fate/Zero
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-20
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-12-06 12:14:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/735513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indelicates/pseuds/indelicates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Blink and Reality Shivers

A girl stands at the end of a world drowning in white. The colorless sky falls to the ground in frozen sheets and the layers that cover the ground have been recreated into a dress that clings to her like an evening in June. She hears footsteps in the background but they’re in her head and her reflection in the window is alone.

“I had that dream again” she says, _of a war that tore everything apart_. First us and then the world. She crawls back into bed where there’s warmth and light in the form of a man who’d taught her love, and she decides she’ll never bring it up again.

\---

Winter glows like the father of a newborn when it finally falls upon them. It blankets them in thick sameness because it’d been a long time coming, but they’re reassured by the definitive form it’s finally taken, after flashing in and out like lightning throughout half of what should have been autumn. When it’s evening they hold each other together. On the couch they watch Camelot, but there’s something about it that gives her nightmares. “I had that dream again. Of a man who tore everything apart.”

“Iri,” he tells her, a warmth to his voice that he’s only known for as long as he’s known her. She feels like she’s known him her whole life. But she counts the years it’s been and there are only eight. Once there was a man with blood on his hands and the sun in his heart. This story has the same end. “Go back to sleep.”

\---

They eat ice cream and play Go Fish and they call it a family game night. Illyasviel had been born in the spring, and like the flowers that had fought their way up out of the snow that year, she is determined to win. Her parents hold hands briefly when they give each other cards, and she calls out for a king.

She’s declared the winner and Kiritsugu suggests they go somewhere far away.

“My love, we just returned from Japan,” says Irisviel.

“There’s more of the world to see,” he says, _than cherry blossoms and summer clouds_. His eyes smile at Illya. Under the table, he’s rubbing at the lies on the back of his hand. Another place and time and story, a man stands at an end he’d helped create of a world he’d tried to save. The world is small and consists of two people with hair like the frozen sky that falls in pieces to the ground. Irisviel wakes up.

I had that dream again, my love.

In the morning light, they eat cereal from plastic bowls and brush their teeth by the bathroom sink. Illya sits at a table and builds some semblance of normalcy out of popsicle sticks while a war is beginning and ending on the count of zero. And Kiritsugu is aiming a rifle at anything that threatens the realization of peace. And Irisviel lies broken and alone.

And this story ends like this.

Kiritsugu wakes up wearing a thick layer of the remnants of his dream. An age-old one wherein a man tries and tries to keep from losing everything, yet loss lurks in the spaces between his hands and the people he holds onto, no matter what he does.

The world now is the size of a boy asleep down the hall. Something he can wrap his arms twice around, so that there aren’t any spaces or in-betweens. One day it will be spring again, he thinks.

And memories of a wife and a daughter will melt with the snow.

And there will be blue skies in the morning and birds will sing about nightmares they know nothing about.

One day it won’t be so cold.


End file.
